


Burning and Bleeding

by Bookmark



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, No Dialogue, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 05:31:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4613031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bookmark/pseuds/Bookmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look into Dean's relationship with fire, Sam's relationship with blood, and their relationship with each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning and Bleeding

You knew a girl who burned. Maybe girl isn't the right term for the woman who bore you. You knew a mother, a queen, a goddess of love and light. She was lost to the flames. Sometimes, when you're dreaming, you think you can still feel the heat.

In school, the children and you learn about the Salem Witch Trials. The others laugh at how unbelievable it seemed, but all you can think about is how hot it must have been, how it must have combusted the families left behind. You've heard of witches though, your dad hates them. You decide some things should burn. You do not laugh though, and you stop participating in class.

You burn a ghost on a hunt with your father. He makes you start the match, but one isn't enough. You the light the entire package, and the fire licks bones clean. It burns your face at first, but then you adjust.

Your brother tries to cook something for himself while you were taking a nap. You rip the blazing pot from his hands and shove it under the already running sink. You suffer minor burns, which your father gives you ointment for before passing out on a motel bed. Since your brother is asleep by then, you have to apply it yourself. He is not allowed in the kitchen again.

The first wendigo hunt you go on, you twist your ankle on a knotted branch and fall. You dropped your flamethrower in the dark somewhere, which leaves you quietly crying in pain and grappling in the dark, when you hear it. Something unnatural, in the woods. Panicked, you cry out for your dad, but he doesn't come. It is not until the monster is but a hairs breath away that he comes out of the thicket of trees to your left, steps over you, and torches the monster. You think he must have had to run fast to get to you in time before you realize he must have already been there. Waiting.

You meet another girl. She is your brother's new light, you see it behind his eyes. She shines there, above the angry, rebelling boy you knew. You meet him again, when she too burns in the ever increasing funeral pyre of your lives.

You see your mother again, but your increasing knowledge of flames does not stop her from burning away. This time she is a shadow, not the light.

The flames in hell are different. They don't really burn. Well, not more then anything else there. You burn like your mother alive, and your fathers corpse, and when you are lifted away you are not sure if you have really escaped the fire. Or if you hadn't always been in the fire before.

You had met a girl before, who reminds you of yourself. You and her had played a dangerous game between philia and eros. When you meet for the last time, she reminds you she is her own sun. She and her mother die when exposed to a burn not her own. This time, the flames remind you of how empty you have become since this life has started, how much the fires have burned you to ashes. Because, even in the wake of this devastation, you do not feel the heat.

 

\--------

 

You do not remember this, but the nightmare began with blood. A couple of drops trickle down from hand to lips and you take them in even though you had already been fed that night. Licking it off, blood mingles with saliva and nothing is ever clean in your life again.

It's dirty in the motel rooms you spend your childhood in. The floors creak, there is dust, and one time your brother found a dead rat hidden behind a rickety TV set. Your father often comes home bleeding, ruby splotches or drops fall onto the floors of your residences and you do not stay long enough to know if the stains are permanent.

You give yourself a paper cut tearing through a new library book. Liquid streams out of you onto the crisp white page. You cannot return it like this, the librarian asked you to be responsible with it.

The first time your brother comes home bleeding, you already know about monsters. He's got bite wounds on his arms and he looks exhausted, and you wonder what kind of monster would want to drink blood.

Sir Lancelot is a hero. Dashing and brave, wielding swords and chivalry. He reminds you of your brother, in some ways, but not of yourself. Sir Lancelot and the knights of the round table clean the blood off after a battle. You don't know what makes you think that's an explanation, all you know is that they are clean, and you are not.

The first time you come home bleeding you are in shock, being carried in by a fretting brother. You are a newly drafted soldier in this long war, and the battle has gone poorly. Your face feels like a Picasso painting. You look at yourself in the mirror, lumpen eye, bloody split lip, swollen and uneven. It's not a masterpiece, it's filthy.

Blood pours out of you like it's racing to the ground, you walk some steps but the knife in your back is to much and you fall to the arms that were waiting. Things are blurry. You see green eyes, hear muffled things and remember a monster too well for you to not have met him before. He seemed like a ghost, haunting your side, but not at all like a ghost. Too alive. You are dead.

You are alive again (but your brother is not) when a different demon explains what you were made for. She shows you how to get the mess everywhere, how to pollute yourself to the point of clarity. Before you were a white canvas with a red splotch you could not rid yourself of. Now you are a red canvas with a white spot, and you know just how to fix it.

You do not drink blood anymore, even the hunger has stopped. You still see it daily though, from your brother, your friends, demons, and others in this world of war around you. You are once again mostly a white canvas, but this time you know the blood did stain, and you have no idea how to cure yourself. You keep trying. The nightmare continues.

**Author's Note:**

> Also on my tumblr tagged under "my stuff"


End file.
